Geography professor digs deeply into e-waste

Dr. Josh Lepawsky has received a substantial SSHRC grant for his
work on e-waste.

By Janet Harron

The old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s
treasure is getting a new spin as a result of ongoing research in
the Faculty of Arts.

The Department of Geography’s Dr. Josh Lepawsky was recently
awarded a Canadian Environmental Research Grant by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for his project
Blurred Borders: Mapping Canada’s Role in the International
Trade and Traffic of Electronic Waste.

The grant of $248,000 over three years will fund fieldwork for
himself and his graduate students in Singapore, Dhaka (Bangladesh)
and Nairobi (Kenya).

Much of Canada’s electronic waste ends up in developing
countries where working machines and parts are re-invented,
sometimes re-configured, while plastics and aluminum are melted
down and used in new products. The environmental and health effects
of this phenomenon are well documented but there is another side to
the story.

As Dr. Lepawsky explains, these kinds of materials, although highly
toxic, are crucial for the survival of domestic industries in
countries such as Kenya and Bangladesh, and are a significant
source of employment. The establishment of international
conventions to halt such trade results in a tangle of issues and
questions that Dr. Lepawsky hopes to answer in his research.

Primarily he is concerned with how materials designated as waste in
one place become sources of value elsewhere.

“Essentially I am looking at how a material thing switches in
and out of a category depending on where it is and who is involved
with it,” says Dr. Lepawsky. “Things [that] we take for
granted as just ‘normal’ and ‘there’ are
actually incredibly complex social constructs.”

Although waste itself falls under provincial jurisdiction in
Canada, there are federal regulations over the import and export of
hazardous materials. Canada is a signatory to international
conventions that ban exporting such materials as e-waste. However,
bilateral trade agreements do allow shipment of such materials to
the United States which in turn acts as a gateway to developing
countries.

Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) names e-waste as an
important revenue stream for organized crime. As part of his
project Dr. Lepawsky hopes to examine closed case files to
determine generic patterns detailing what criminal organizations
are involved and what international connections they are using.

There is currently no way of knowing exactly how much and what kind
of e-waste is exported from Canada because of the way in which
trade data is collected. But there is no such grey area in terms of
its economic benefits to developing countries. In some cases, Dr.
Lepawsky explains, those selling the recycled raw materials are
enjoying profit margins approaching 300 percent whereas the
original manufacture of a computer monitor might have made a profit
margin of three to five percent.

“This is exactly why this research is so important –
separating the economic from the moral is not a realistic
description or assessment of the actual situation on the
ground,” says Dr. Lepawsky. “In purely economic terms
the recycling of e-waste works but we have to consider the
consequences of the atrocious health and environmental conditions
as well.”